Those concerned with the rise of misinformation must confront the erosion of journalistic integrity and independence over the past decade or so. Once, journalists traded on their reputation for being trustworthy. Now, though, most repeat too many ideological talking points to credibly maintain their independence or integrity.
Much can be learned from the views and techniques of corporate activist “gadfly,” public relations whiz, and staunchly independent financial broadcast journalist Wilma Soss (1900–1986), the subject of our new book.
Soss was most notorious for showing up at annual stockholder meetings in eye-catching costumes to scold corporate executives for paying themselves too much, not putting enough qualified women on their boards, engaging in various accounting shenanigans, and so forth. But that was her third career. During the Depression and World War II, she made a small fortune in her second career as a corporate public relations consultant.But her first career was journalism. After graduating from college in 1925, she wrote for a few years for a Brooklyn newspaper. It wasn’t until 1957 that Soss moved onto the national journalism scene in a big way with her nationally syndicated radio show “Pocketbook News.” She boasted more than a million listeners during at least part of the show’s run, which ended in 1980 due more to Soss’s advanced age than a ratings slip.
Tellingly, early in the run, Soss gave up a lucrative sponsorship with a prominent pharmaceutical company because she found it too editorially intrusive to be beholden to a corporation—better to make less money but maintain audience trust and thus reach more people. NBC execs agreed.
Soss didn’t pretend to be unbiased, but she did promise that she believed whatever came out of her mouth because it was based on her own understanding of her own research and experience, not some business or political agenda. Many people didn’t like what Soss said on air and let her bosses at NBC know about it. But Soss didn’t care because she promised to speak her version of the truth, and she delivered it week after week for almost a quarter of a century.
What Soss learned at school and in her career was that the best journalism is an empirically grounded interpretive art. Her moderate Republican political views certainly informed her interpretation of the week’s news, but it didn’t, indeed couldn’t, dominate it. Her listeners sought trenchant analysis of the course of the economy and financial markets, not political spin. Understanding the economic implications of policy changes, not scoring political points, was the key to investment success.
Soss liked to spin a good yarn, especially about her own exploits in corporate boardrooms, but only and always to make a broader point that could help listeners. She tried to persuade listeners to her views about the economic importance of peace and the gold-backed dollar but never deliberately misled anyone. And persuade she did, through logic, empirical evidence, experience, theory, integrity, and independence.
Surely journalists today can learn from skilled progenitors such as Soss and return journalism not to an ahistorical utopia somehow free from bias, but to a period when journalists could be trusted to serve as independent checks against mindless mantras and political talking points.
Journalistic integrity will return when journalists again speak the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, as they see it, and especially, when they remain silent when they know not of what they speak.